In 1937, President Franklin Roosevelt created the Farm Security Administration (FSA) to aid American farmworkers during the Great Depression. Its photographers aimed to document what was going on, in an effort to raise awareness and support. Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange were two of those photographers. Interestingly, there is one school of thought, repeated by Susan Meiselas and Wendy Ewald, …
Let Us Now Praise Words
During the Depression, Fortune sent writer James Agee and photographer Walker Evans document the lives of cotton sharecroppers in Alabama. It was meant to be part of a series Life and Circumstances. Agee was a poet, and he described himself as ‘more a communist than not‘. Evans was on loan to Fortune from the Farm Security Administration (FSA). Fortune never …